The Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia (BR1M) cash handout is one of the Najib Abdul Razak administration's successes, said prominent economist Jomo Kwame Sundaram.

This amid opposition criticism that BR1M is "political corruption" and a stop gap measure to address social welfare.

"I think (BR1M) is one of the successes of the present regime, but it was really due to the fact that labour unions and NGOs and opposition parties have campaigned for decades for some kind of improved social provisioning," he said in a forum titled 'Integration with Integrity' in Kuala Lumpur today.